Poetry
by Garrett Stack Butterfly wrangling The last summer before adulthood I wrangled butterflies for beer money. First thing before the coffee I moistened nesting trellises, tacked up chrysalides, removed empty husks. Some mornings when I arrived there were already butterflies dangling from their cocoons. Emerged with the dawn their bright wings fluttered and dried in the sun. I'd open the cages and out they'd fly, fitful at first lilting like a child's fingers across new piano keys, but stronger and straighter with each fractional beat of weightless wings. When I was training to become a wrangler, my manager demonstrated how to coax their delicate bodies onto the crook of a finger and toss them up into the wet greenhouse air. Some of them though emerged broken, their wings stunted, unable to spread. Those ones, he said, we just throw away. He smiled and crushed the one he held between thumb and finger small wings dangling from his fist like torn silk. The weird ones, he said, upset the guests. First to burn Laying up some wood in the middle of summer is North Country for thinking long term. Sweating now to sweat later, tossing logs hand to hand truck to cord. Routine enough to lose yourself in the stacking, fitting unique pieces into uniform shape like soldiers standing in formation or lovers forming a whole, but not us. It’s not is if we were square peg round hole, but no amount of sweating and shifting could snug us, too many angles and edges to ever lie flat. The woodsmen call them duggers, logs too misshapen to join the pile they’re placed on top apart from the rest, but not wasted they’re first to burn come winter. When I wake in a darkened room I want to go home And talk earnestly Over split lips To feel the old cold Through the slats And drink the night And the fire With the boys Grown fat Not soft Waiting for their war Their hands Do the talking And their wives These strangers Who traded in Their aprons but Not their aches And to remember Just once more What its like To fall asleep In the tall grass Where the only things That wait for me To wake Are cold ashes And the sun Streaming in Through the slits In my eyes |
Garrett Stack received his MA from San Diego State University in writing studies and is currently working on his PhD in English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studies rhetoric and dabbles in poetry. This is his first publication.
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